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It presented the biblical story of Christ's birth using a libretto that he and director Peter Sellars assembled from both the traditional and apocryphal gospels together with poems by 20th-century Mexican women.

He left out some curious stuff, like The Bitter Withy and The Seven Virgins, which are very old songs from the Apocryphal Gospels.

It is a gigantic trilogy, into which are fused and co-ordinated all the dramatic representations borrowed for three centuries from the canonical and apocryphal gospels.

His mother seemed to have expected a miracle, yet in the Fourth Gospel the Cana wonder was the beginning of miracle working by Jesus; the apocryphal gospels assert that Jesus practised miracle working as a child.

To be sure, we have a Yankee Pope Joan, a Messiah in petticoats who has uttered the illuminating phrase, "My first and for ever message is one and eternal," which is no more a parody of Holy Writ than The Brook Kerith, a book which while it must have given its author pains to write—so full of Talmudic and Oriental lore and the lore of the apocryphal gospels is it—must have been also a joy to him as a literary artist.